VATOS
It should be said that Robert Kirkman, the writer of the comic this series is based on, penned this week’s episode. The comic’s great when it focuses on the pervasive bleakness of survival rather than the monotony of survival; a difficult pose to hold as Kirkman has said the comic needs to continue as long as possible—to survive—to truly accomplish its goal (the medium is the message). Kirkman’s truly great when he tricks the audience into believing he’s telling a story rather than stalling for time.
And Kirkman’s aces when he opens on sisters Andrea and Amy, who spend the entire opening talking about fishing and not fishing—how their parents raised them differently because of the twelve years between them. How the world’s gone out from under their feet.The scene’s one of the first instances of the audience spending time with characters that aren’t Shane, Rick, or Lorie (other than the terrific sequence with Morgan in the first episode).
Developing the survivors is the territory the show needs to claim if it wants to keep an audience, unless it’s supposed to attract Food Network viewers who like characters that double as beef marionettes. Because we’re four episodes in and it feels like if The Walking Dead were a movie we wouldn’t have gotten out of the first thirty minutes.
Opening on Andrea and Amy, stretching the bounds of story from Rick Grimes discovering a desolated world, is so unusual for The Walking Dead that it telegraphs one of these girls will be eaten. Probably by sundown.
Elsewhere in the camp, the loner Jim can’t stop digging holes, which frightens people for some reason. Shane sublimates his anger at Rick’s arrival into tackling Jim. From underneath Shane, Jim describes how powerless he was (is?) when the zombies took his family out of his hands. The holes he digs are a broken mind’s attempt at healing.
This was much better than last episode’s ass-kicking, establishing Shane’s dominance (and his need for dominance) as well as the camp’s reliance on his merciful force. I wonder how long until Shane demands for Lori’s return as well.
These two camp stories grow into one another with a zombie attack on the fish fry—the first true aggressive zombie move our survivors have gone through at the home base.
Kirkman’s script falls down repeatedly while Rick and Glenn and Daryl and T-Dog can’t find that dag-nabbed Merle, but instead find themselves in a whole mess of trouble with a Latin gang that goes after the guns Rick left near the tank at the exact same moment as our heroes. Oh no!
The show seemed to want to play its zombie story pretty straight (from unoriginal first encounter to unoriginal first escape), which meant that the Latin gang, the Vatos, were supposed to be the big reveal that the true enemies aren’t the zombies but humans who will stop at nothing in an effort to survive. This is the storyline that Kirkman was toeing until he forgot how to have Guillermo take some action and let a grandmother wander in as a botched-joke-turned-poor-deus-ex-machina.
Turns out the Vatos are gangsters with hearts of gold. The gang leaders used to work at a rest home but wouldn’t let the dead kill the elderly. Their members come from cholos wanting to make sure their families were okay.
Kirkman seemed to want to talk about race relations in a world where authority has been decentralized (thanks to zombies). Without current social forces, what could be interpreted as a gang becomes a protective unit, practical in basic ways. That was the iceberg that Guillermo alluded to when he said that the zombies “hadn’t changed a thing” in the way things work. Latinos are not at home in a world run by white folks AND a world overrun by zombie folks.
Or, if you don’t want to read into it, Kirkman wanted to manufacture some tension without having to worry about wounding or killing off characters the viewer already knows and couldn’t blow up the budget with a big gun fight.
EXTRA THOUGHTS
-Kirkman loves to juxtapose what people were before the Zompocalypse and what they are now: pizza delivery guy, nurse, janitor.
-I’m glad Rick and company ran all the way back to camp. On foot.
-I guess they’re keeping Merle alive for a big bad guy show down to bring Shane and Rick together before the truth comes out.
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